Seems very sharp and honest to me. Read some Kristol and the neocons and see if you don’t come to similar conclusions.
Hate for Hillary would have been magnitudes worse than hate for Obama. There would have been no honeymoon period from the public either, as a lot of them seem to hate her with little rationality too.
Given that choice between worse hate and nothing done to less hate and little done, I’ll go with the latter.
You didn’t know it was an opinion? Get serious, ElvisL1ves. Of course it was my opinion. It’s an opinion based on the health care failure in 1993, when the Clinton White House is accused of screwing up by trying to bludgeon a health reform package through Congress and alienating its allies in the process, and on some of the low points of her campaign, like the “inevitability” strategy (which came across as ‘I’m the nominee and you can’t do anything about it’).
I said she might be doing better at the horse trading in Washington but the drawbacks, such as a less positive image with the public, would more or less cancel them out. Is this actually that complicated?
Agreed. The right wing has a looong history of Clinton-hating. Sure they’re saying crazy shit about Obama now, but prior to the 2008 Iowa Caucus, when it became apparent he had a serious shot at winning the White House, I doubt many conservatives really worried very much about him.
With the Clintons they’ve been formulating various conspriracy theories for years, so elaborate that they’d make Obama’s alleged Kenyan birth look about as grievous as a clerical error.
This is just naive. Everyone knows that when you win the election, you ran the most brilliant campaign and when you lose, you made so many mistakes as to make you incompetent. The truth is, someone always loses in an election and that doesn’t make the loser incompetent. What you see as disastrous would have been seen as daring had Hillary won. What you see as military precision could be viewed as inflexible had Obama lost.
To answer the OP - Hillary would have done a much better job. Sure, there will always be Hillary-haters, but that’s old news. And anything that the GOP will throw at her will be seen as that - stale. It won’t play as much in the media.
The reason the plan is sitting on Obama’s desk is because six months ago they told him they needed 12 000 troops to fix the problem, now six months later they’re back for more. Obama is thinking what might happen six months or a year from now. And the military are trying to box Obama in over this. The head guy in Afghanistan said in the papers today “You can’t hope to contain the fire by letting just half the building burn.” I must have missed it when they were pointing this out from 2003-8 when we had less troops there than we do now. Afghanistan was lost before Obama took office, originally Obama wanted to tough it out until his second term when he could withdraw with no consequences but things are so bad there now he might have to do it earlier. The Biden plan is the only remotely sensible long term option too.
And you can’t criticise Obama compared to Bush in terms of anything to do with wars, you really can’t. Like with the economy, the federal budget, the deficits etc., Obama is just dealing with the wreckage of the eight-year-long relentless shower of shit visited on America by the Bush administration. There are only bad and less bad ways of doing that, Obama is looking at an unfortunately endless array of turds and having to work out which ones he’d most like to step in.
There would have been almost no difference at all. Same policies, same positions, same teabagging nonsense and general GOP opposition to everything. Hillary would have bent over for the financial, auto industries just as much as Obama did. Same cave-in over healthcare too but she wouldn’t even have said boo to Israel although Obama made no actual difference by saying boo.
No, but being incompetent tends to make people lose. Either address our reasons for feeling she was incompetent, or quit trying to misrepresent our position.
Fine, as long as you acknowledge that you’re essentially expressing just your own hatred, not any of those “fact” thingies.
Grumman, if you go over the vote totals, you’ll find a very fine line between whatever your favorite laudatory words for Obama are and “incompetence”. Try another formulation: Perhaps you could explain why he had to work so hard to defeat someone with all the severe defects, including this “incompetence”, that you and Marley23 point out? How could someone that “incompetent” have come so close?
One characteristic that embracers of hate do seem to share is an inability to consider even the possibility that that’s what it is.
Dick, you’re right to point out that he’s got enough to do just cleaning up after Bush, but at some point those problems do become his. He does have to decide what our objectives in Afghanistan ought to be (if they’re much broader than “catch Bin Laden” then there’s going to have to be some discussion).
YogSosoth, do you think there would be, or still is, some substantial portion of the population yet to be converted to Hillary Hate? I would have thought we were all used to dismissing that noise from the long years of RW yammerers pushing it. But then, it did turn up among a surprising number of Democrats who had become infatuated with her opponent, so maybe you’re right.
But this is Great Debates. Opinions are expected to be supported, or at least explained, or they’re just a waste of server space.
Since the Democratic primaries ended more than a year ago, I’d forgotten how tiresome it was to experience your railing against anybody who had the nerve to criticize anything Hillary Clinton did.
I don’t hate Clinton and never did. I’ve made that clear before, and you may have read some of them, but even if you haven’t, you’re making a ridiculous mischaracterization of what I said. I was discussing a problem she has had in communicating her messages to the public, which is part of the job of being president. I cited couple of examples. There are others, but fortunately I don’t remember all the ins and outs of the interminable campaign of the last two years.
Lucky man.
Personally I think Hillary would have been a terrible president - during the primaries she struck me as someone who was going to go out of her way to prove she could be as hardnosed as the next guy (being a woman, a Democrat and a Clinton, the “soft on everything” allegations would have come thick and fast), and it would have clouded her judgment.
As SoS she can put that hardnosedness [sic] to better use; if she hadn’t been in the Cabinet she would have made an excellent Senate Majority Leader.
I’ll agree with Anduril and ElvisL1ves on this point: Clinton made mistakes in her campaign, but they’re being magnified because she lost. Many of her mistakes were survivable, they’re just being deemed fatal in retrospect because we know the outcome. She had some advantages going in, and the caucus thing was a big miscalculation, but she did come very close to winning and not everything about her campaign was as horrible as people here keep saying it was. And by the same token Obama’s campaign was very well run but wasn’t perfect.
Isn’t that pretty much the definition of fatal mistakes, that they can only be defined that way when you know the outcome?
His objective was to muddle through till after the 2012 election then pull out. Now we find out if he’s a strong leader or a weak leader when it comes to foreign policy. If he’s strong he pulls out and does the Biden plan, if he’s weak he escalates.
After more than a year, it’s disappointing to continue to see the same irrational hatred still being spewed.
You’d be the last to know, wouldn’t you?
You can’t be positive it’s fatal, but you can get a reasonable assesment on how damaging a mistake might be. Every campaign makes mistakes, and some of the ones seized on here were not that big a deal. They also don’t prove she would have made a bad president, but we’ll never know how that would have worked out.
She would have been worse. She owes too many people and it connected to too many power brokers. She would have stayed in Afghanistan . We listen to our generals who we declare as experts with arcane knowledge we do not have. So they say "more troops’. That is their mantra. Every damn one in the service wants more wars and more troops. When they retire ,sometimes they get honest and say what a waste their warring has been. Then they talk of the miscalculations and errors. Only when they retire, unless they go to work for a military contractor and they become even more hawkish . do they tell the truth.
(bolding mine)
But doesn’t Hillary’s perceived advantages and “inevitability” show that her mistakes were as big as people thought? Obama was almost a complete unknown in early 2008 and the Clinton machine should have rolled right over him.
While Obama ran a great campaign, he needed Hillary to bungle her campaign the way she did to win. Without that, we’re talking about President Clinton today.